Enforcing civil rights without these reports will be difficult for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pushing US agency closer to Trump’s agenda, experts warn
The US civil rights agency mandated to protect equal rights for workers is set to stop collecting data on the demographic makeup of companies – which for the past six decades has been used to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
The move marks a fundamental shift for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Without this data, it will be much harder for the agency to identify widespread cases of discrimination in hiring and promotions, experts and former employees of the commission say. And, they warn, it will bring the Trump administration one step closer to reshaping the commission from an independent watchdog into an arm of the executive branch narrowly focused on advancing the political grievances of Donald Trump’s base.
Over the summer, the EEOC proposed terminating its EEO-1 reports, which require companies to submit information on employees, broken down by race, ethnicity, sex and job title. The proposal comes amid the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and its consistent work to terminate or alter decades’ worth of federal datasets because they conflict with its political goals. The majority-Republican commission is expected to approve the measure sometime in the fall.
“Getting rid of this data collection is part of a larger effort to weaponize civil rights enforcement and flip the laws that we have on their head,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on the education and workplace justice team at the National Women’s Law Center, which is suing the EEOC for refusing to enforce workplace protections for trans employees.
The EEO-1 is the only data collection of its kind, providing insights into trends such as the percentage of women in senior level executive positions in US companies and the racial makeup of a company’s lowest-paid staff. With this data, the EEOC, since its creation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has investigated thousands of employee complaints every year and helped recover billions of dollars for employees who faced discrimination and harassment.
But since Trump took office again in January 2025, the EEOC has completely rewritten its strategic goals, and is now prioritizing discrimination claims made by white men, dropping cases on behalf of transgender workers, investigating workplace diversity practices, and rescinding anti-harassment guidance.
At a July hearing, Andrea Lucas, the EEOC commissioner who was appointed by Trump, claimed the agency’s demographic data collection is unconstitutional, burdensome on employers, encourages DEI programs, and incentivizes discrimination against white workers.
“I believe the Commission’s proposed rescission of the annual reporting requirement will not hinder the Commission’s law enforcement work to investigate specific charges of discrimination,” Lucas said in a statement on the proposed end of the data collection. The EEOC did not respond to the Guardian’s specific questions about how the agency’s priorities have shifted under the second Trump administration.
The EEOC receives nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints every year. EEO-1 data is one of the first tools EEOC investigators use to determine what cases it should put its limited enforcement resources towards, a question that has become especially important at a time when the EEOC’s staffing levels are at its lowest point in 45 years.
“If you see a particular employer really stands out because they have fewer women in management or fewer Black people in management compared to their peer employers in the same industry or in the same area, it’s more likely the case that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s something going on here,” said Karla Gilbride, a former general counsel at the EEOC who is now a deputy director of litigation for the Disability Rights program at the ACLU.
The EEO-1 data is also made public in the aggregate (meaning individual employers cannot be identified). For researchers and civil rights advocates, it has been an important source of data to evaluate the impact of diversity and workforce policies.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a founding director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that he and other researchers have had data-sharing agreements with the EEOC since the late 1990s. Last summer, the EEOC abruptly terminated all data-sharing agreements with social scientists and stopped all communication with them, said Tomaskovic-Devey.
In cases when the EEOC can’t settle a complaint with the employer, they can take the employer to court, and EEO-1 data can also be used as supporting evidence in litigation.
One such lawsuit started with a complaint filed by Cassandra Coleman. In 2016, she applied for a trucking job at the Phoenix, Arizona, office of Central Transport, a large national trucking company. A male employee tried to discourage her from applying. “It’s not going to do you any good,” he said, according to the complaint. Despite having 21 years of experience and a spotless driving record, Coleman never got a call back from the company. Central Transport hired 10 male truck drivers around the same time.
